Thursday, July 9, 2015

Hello, my name is...

Hiya, folks. Today I've turned over my blog to an absolutely wonderful author whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person at the 2014 World Horror Con in Portland. I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did.
***

Hello, my name is…

Loren Rhoads

My mother was a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by
books. Once she showed me where the
science fiction shelf was, I’d sit down and work my way through it.

It didn’t take long for me to notice all the writers (in
those misty, far off days) were men.
Even the few women wrote under male names: Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh,
James Tiptree Jr., and the ambiguously gendered (to me) Leigh Brackett and
Marion Zimmer Bradley.

The message I took from it was that women were welcome in
small numbers, as long as they passed socially as men. It was a message I had already internalized.
I never felt like my given name fit me.
From an early age, I called myself George – long before I knew that was
the nickname of Nancy Drew’s female friend.

I could dress up with the other girls, put on lipstick and
curl my hair, but it always felt like a costume, a show of femininity. I never felt male, really. I just never felt traditionally female,
either.

I chose my new name before I applied to Clarion. Loren summed me up. It was a masculine form of a name when
written, but when heard, the gender was ambiguous. People could guess which gender fit,
according to their preferences, but when they met me, they needed to reconcile
the gender of the name with the obvious gender of my body.

I understood that science fiction was, at that time, written
about men. So I wrote about the men I
knew, my gay friends from high school.

The story that got me into Clarion was about a transgender
prostitute named Tolly. Thomas Disch,
one of my Clarion instructors, was extremely disappointed when he met me and my
gender didn’t match his expectations, based on the spelling of my name and the
subject of my story. The same story,
when written by a woman, meant something completely different to him.

Thirty years later, I’m looking at the problem from the
other direction. When my publishers
approached me about The Dangerous Type
books, they asked if I would consider using a more feminine pen name. It could be an open secret, like Seanan
McGuire/Mira Grant. They just wanted
readers to be able to look at the front of the book and know it was written by
a woman.

I got out of that by pointing out I would need to begin my
social media connections from scratch under the new name.

It makes me wonder, though:
how much are we really influenced – as book shoppers – by the unfamiliar
name on a book cover? Does gender trump
cover art or blurb or back cover description?

***

Loren’s new novel is The
Dangerous Type, first of a trilogy called In the Wake of the Templars.
The other books – Kill by Numbers
and No More Heroes – will be
published by Night Shade Books before the end of the year.

Enslaved, trained as a killer, betrayed, entombed, and
abandoned: you can see why Raena Zacari might have a chip on her shoulder.
In the grimdark universe of Rhoads’s propulsive, action-heavy debut, the
universe’s deadliest assassin sets off on a mission of vengeance into a
galaxy destabilized by genocidal warfare. Her target, the despotic warlord
Thallian, is on the run for war crimes but determined to reclaim what he
believes is his by right. The stage is set for a revenge tale constructed
from a web of complex, strained relationships made messier by two decades
of forced separation.